DISCUSSION POINT - SUGGESTION

[nae199]

I am in favour of this general proposal, replace the YT20 with an U25 comp. I think it then gives all players in your club meaningful game time. Both my main team and affiliate are fully home grown and it's borderline impossible to keep players in that age range until they get good enough for seniors while staying competitive. This would give a genuine reason for keeping them so I think it is a great idea.
I have seen some comments opposed to the idea because 21 or 22 year old in real life don't play senior pro - which planet are you on!?!?
I am firmly in favour, no problem with it being on a Monday or the schedule changing, makes no difference to me and will be the same for everyone.
I do agree with tweaking the training though to make younger seniors much more competitive, but I would counter this by making experience much much more impactful on overall ability and performance, but much much harder to earn. The very best elite players should only be reaching legendary in their very very late 20s at the earliest in my opinion.

[BigglyG]

Why not approach this from a different angle. If teams need 29-32 yo to be successful, and 22-26 yo's are not valuable, why not change the mechanics so that a team with some 23-26 year olds can be a consistent winner?

How about reducing the impact of experience, or capping it at age 24?

One of the least attractive parts of FTP is that there is basically one way to win. If the rules were tweaked so there were at least two and preferable three ways to win it would make the game better.

[GA-James018]

Part of the argument in favour of addressing the 21-25 "dead zone" is that it would actually favour home-grown teams more and provide more ways to win. My own team is quasi-home grown: I do buy some players, both youth and senior, to fill gaps, but the bulk of my squad is spending nearly their whole career at my club, from teens to 30s. The biggest issue I find is that if I want to play my best team in SOD and T20 games to get the best results I can, I'm nearly always just picking from my oldest 12-13 players, those aged around 26 and up, because those who are younger just aren't at the same skill level. I would have thought any home-grown team, regardless of their stage of development, would have that issue. Please, someone enlighten me if that isn't the case.

At the moment, the system heavily favours selling off any youths once they hit 21, or before then if you don't care about youth results, and buying ready-made players in their late 20s or 30s. That way you skip having anyone in your squad who you're paying wages week in week out for doing nothing. That is a valid strategy, but at the moment it is arguably favoured too much over more organic, home-grown based approaches. Having a way for players in the 21-25 range to actually play and contribute meaningfully to your side's success should, at least in theory, level things up a bit. A new format/league geared at those players isn't necessarily the only way to achieve that, but it's what this proposal starts with as a suggestion. Again, very open to ideas and alternatives. BIgglyG's call about changing the mechanics of player progression (whether experience or something else) is another avenue, for example.

[Rbtrager]

I like the general premise of the idea. I’d also prefer to retain the current schedule and existing Cup, with any Youth/U25 Cup being an additional competition rather than replacing what we already have.

My main concern is whether simply changing U21 to U25 just pushes the existing problem further up the age scale. Instead of everyone targeting the same 20/21-year-olds, we could end up with everyone trying to stockpile the strongest 23/24-year-olds to remain competitive. The bottleneck has moved rather than disappeared.

It might therefore be worth looking at eligibility more broadly than age alone. For example, the competition could use age in combination with another restriction, or potentially move away from a strict age limit altogether. Some options could be:

- an U25 competition with a total XI salary cap;
- U25 plus a maximum individual player rating;
- U25 plus an experience ceiling;
- a total team rating cap;
- a salary cap without an age restriction; or
- some combination of age, salary, rating and experience.

A salary-cap model particularly interests me because it gives managers multiple ways to construct a competitive side. One manager might use several stronger, higher-paid players surrounded by developing players, while another might field a more evenly balanced XI. That creates genuine squad-building decisions rather than everyone following the same path of retaining the best players immediately below an arbitrary age cut-off.

A rating or experience restriction could achieve something similar, although I think any rating cap would need to be based on the player's known rating before the match so there is no issue with orders/default line-ups changing eligibility.

The objective, as I see it, should be to create another meaningful development competition without simply creating a new optimal age bracket that everyone feels compelled to target. If we can achieve that through a combination of age and squad-strength limits, there may be more viable strategies and a wider range of players getting games.

[Cynic]

I am in favour of this general proposal, replace the YT20 with an U25 comp. I think it then gives all players in your club meaningful game time. Both my main team and affiliate are fully home grown and it's borderline impossible to keep players in that age range until they get good enough for seniors while staying competitive. This would give a genuine reason for keeping them so I think it is a great idea.
I have seen some comments opposed to the idea because 21 or 22 year old in real life don't play senior pro - which planet are you on!?!?
I am firmly in favour, no problem with it being on a Monday or the schedule changing, makes no difference to me and will be the same for everyone.
I do agree with tweaking the training though to make younger seniors much more competitive, but I would counter this by making experience much much more impactful on overall ability and performance, but much much harder to earn. The very best elite players should only be reaching legendary in their very very late 20s at the earliest in my opinion.

People want to play the realism card about this? That's a deep rabbit hole that I don't think they will want to look into.

[BigglyG]

I am sure someone could go through the responses and sort them by division. I would guess that Division one owners would be fully in favour whereas div 3 or 4 owners would be against.

[Cynic]

I'm a permanent Div 3 waste of space. I'm not against the idea.

[Nic]

Part of the argument in favour of addressing the 21-25 "dead zone" is that it would actually favour home-grown teams more and provide more ways to win. My own team is quasi-home grown: I do buy some players, both youth and senior, to fill gaps, but the bulk of my squad is spending nearly their whole career at my club, from teens to 30s. The biggest issue I find is that if I want to play my best team in SOD and T20 games to get the best results I can, I'm nearly always just picking from my oldest 12-13 players, those aged around 26 and up, because those who are younger just aren't at the same skill level. I would have thought any home-grown team, regardless of their stage of development, would have that issue. Please, someone enlighten me if that isn't the case.

At the moment, the system heavily favours selling off any youths once they hit 21, or before then if you don't care about youth results, and buying ready-made players in their late 20s or 30s. That way you skip having anyone in your squad who you're paying wages week in week out for doing nothing. That is a valid strategy, but at the moment it is arguably favoured too much over more organic, home-grown based approaches. Having a way for players in the 21-25 range to actually play and contribute meaningfully to your side's success should, at least in theory, level things up a bit. A new format/league geared at those players isn't necessarily the only way to achieve that, but it's what this proposal starts with as a suggestion. Again, very open to ideas and alternatives. BIgglyG's call about changing the mechanics of player progression (whether experience or something else) is another avenue, for example.

I'm all for this. Too many times I've had players between 21-25 wasted in the 'dead zone' because I didn't have the opportunity to get them the experience they needed to be ready when they turn 26/27.

[Lesvosace]

I'm not against the u24 competition. I understand the reason for the idea. It makes sense ut it does feel like a lot of the recent suggestions have been to strengthen 1 way of playing. That be to strengthen managers developing their own home grown talent. I think we need to be careful. We need to ensure we keep variety in approaches. if everyone starts to go the home route it dilutes the game and the transfer market which is important if you want to sell players.

[GM-crowfan65]

thanks Les, that is part of the consideration.
Teams buying players is still well strong enough whether they buy oldies or 21yo.
I can see why you think that and varied ways of playing need to be catered for or it will get boring

[Rbtrager]

Without wanting to push my own barrow too much, I’m becoming more attracted to the idea of a new salary-cap competition rather than simply shifting the age limit for youths.

Say, purely for demonstration, the XI had a total salary cap of $100,000. That gives an average of around $9,000–$10,000 per player, which by default would probably make a large number of 20–25 year-olds viable without specifically restricting the competition to that age group.

The big advantage is that it creates multiple ways to build a competitive side. One manager might select two or three highly paid players and surround them with cheaper developing players, while another might select a more evenly balanced XI. You could also deliberately use the competition to get experience into younger or lower-wage players without automatically making the side uncompetitive.

It would also potentially make all-rounders more valuable. Their wages are often not as high as two equivalent single-skill specialists combined, so having a player who can genuinely contribute with both bat and ball becomes particularly useful when working within a cap.

The other thing I like is that it gives newer clubs a competition in which they can potentially compete much earlier. Under an age-based system, a new club may still need several seasons to develop enough strong players of the correct age. With a salary cap, everyone is working within the same resource constraint from day one.

It also avoids simply moving the existing problem further up the age range. If we go from U21 to U25, we may just create a new incentive for everyone to retain and pay the best 23- and 24-year-olds. A salary cap potentially creates much more variety in squad construction and gives managers several different strategies for achieving the same objective.

[GM-crowfan65]

I dont mind it, its a different suggestion for sure